Description

Overview

There are two major components in a Cisco Nexus 1000V environment:
VSM (Virtual Switch Supervisor) and VEM (Virtual Ethernet Module).
VSM is a virtual machine on a baremetal server. VEM runs inside each host.
VSM, as the name goes, supervises and manages multiple VEMs.

VSM charm installs the Nexus 1000V virtual switch Supervisor
Module virtual machine onto a MaaS cluster node. A cluster can
have up to 2 VSM in active/standby mode (generally in two different servers).
When the active one fails, the standby will take over within bounded time.

VSM charm is not directly dependent of other OpenStack nodes,
unlike other Cisco charms like VEM or VXGW (VLAN Extended Gateway),
which are subordinate charms.

Once the VSM charm is deployed it creates a VSM Virtual Machine (VM)
in the MaaS node. Hence a requirement for VSM to communicate with other
Openstack/Cisco charms is to have L3 connectivity with the rest of
the MaaS cluster nodes.

Usage

In order to use Cisco Openstack solution we would need to install
VSM on a cluster node as well as VEM module that goes into each
host. As today the VSM charm needs to be network reachable to other
nodes using the regular mgmt host interface. (This interface is
specified by the n1kv-phy-intf-bridge configuration parameter of
the charm).

In order to provide High Availability for VSM you'll need to deploy
two VSMs (one will be the primary and another the secondary)
in two different hosts.

In order to deploy the VSMs (both primary and secondary), you will
need to create a configuration file where you need to provide specific
configuration of your VSM. To differentiate the different primary
and secondary VSM configuration, we create separate sections for them
on the configuration file and also you deploy as two different service
names.

The VSM charm will automatically create the VSM VM. For that, you'll
provide (as a minimum):
- a static IP, netmask and gateway address for network reachability
of this VM (by specifiying the n1kv-vsm-mgmt-ip, n1kv-vsm-mgmt-netmask and
n1kv-vsm-mgmt-gateway configuration parameters). This VM uses the
interface specified in n1kv-phy-intf-bridge as external network
interface.
- domain id that the VSM operates (by the n1kv-vsm-domain-id configuration parameter)
- password for the administrator to ssh to the VSM VM (n1kv-vsm-password)
- role which specifies if the VSM will be primary or secondary (n1kv-vsm-role)

For example, you create a myconfig.yaml configuration file with the
following the minimal mandatory information:

Check the config.yaml file for default configuration values and other
configurable parameters of the VSM charm.

Then you deploy the primary VSM with the following command:

juju deploy --config myconfig.yaml vsm vsm-primary

Then you deploy the secondary VSM with the following command:

juju deploy --config myconfig.yaml vsm vsm-secondary

To put VEM into VSM supervision, you need to do the following:

juju add-relation vsm vem

Testing

Prior to submit changes to the charm store for this charm you need to run
the automatic testing implemented in the charm.

IMPORTANT Notice that there are some requirements for the VSM charm to
run the testing scripts. Hence, prior to execute them you need to prepare
and environment with the following nodes available for charm testing
deployment:
- A least two nodes
- Nodes need to be physical (not virtual machines)
- Nodes need to had a tag called "physical"

Then you need a YAML file which will be use by the testing suite to verify
the changes you made for the VSM charm. You can reuse the existing file
(myconfig.yaml) used for deployment of the VSM charm or create another one
specific for testing. The testing scripts expects the following parameters: